Start with proven experience, not the size of the portfolio. Ask for two or three case studies that sit close to your stack, and then find out whether those engineers are still with the erp development company. An honest provider is happy to connect you with the tech lead. Evasive answers at this stage almost always mean the demo work came from somewhere else.
The paperwork needs more scrutiny than the proposal. Three clauses do most of the work: intellectual property assignment, confidentiality, and notice periods and handover. Every artifact has to transfer to you on payment, together with documentation, pipelines and deployment scripts. Watch for language that leaves so-called reusable libraries in the vendor's hands, because it is usually the dependency that makes switching painful.
Ask how they estimate. An honest estimate comes with the assumptions behind it, a task-level breakdown and a best case and a worst case. A fixed-price contract works only when the scope is genuinely frozen; otherwise the provider prices the risk in and global software development company you pay for it anyway. Time and materials moves the risk back to the client, so it requires a sprint cadence, demos and a budget cap.
The delivery process beats headcount. Ask how change requests are handled, who signs off on a feature and how quality assurance works. A mature team will be able to show you running software development outsourcing qatar rather than status reports. Clear, written acceptance criteria remain the only reliable protection against the it-was-never-in-scope conversation.
Last, plan for the handover at the start rather than at the end. Insist that the code repository stays on infrastructure you own from the beginning, and that the documentation is refreshed in every sprint. A vendor with nothing to hide says yes immediately; hesitation here says most of what you need to know.
